Foldvary on philately, stamp collecting

Editorial

Think Globally, Act Philatelically

by Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor

If you have or know young children, whether as a parent, relative, or friend, and would like to encourage them to know something about the world, a good catalyst and vehicle for gaining global knowledge and perspective is stamp collecting, otherwise known as philately.

Many a young child in ancient times before video games learned their geography and history from stamps. When I was a tot, I could name every country in the world, along with all the colonies and territories, and I did not learn this in school, but from stamp collecting. When I got an exotic stamp from Mozambique or Angola, I would look up the country or colony in an atlas and learn something about its history, especially as it related to the subject in the stamp. If the stamp portrayed a person, I would look him or her up in a biographical dictionary. If the stamp showed an animal, I wanted to know what its name was and what it ate and where it lived. I even learned some words in foreign languages, such as Deutschland and Österreich, and what the foreign currencies were.

Stamp collecting need not be a solitary activity, but can also foster friendships and social skills. Stamping kids like to swap duplicates with their collecting friends and look at each other’s collections. Some schools sponsor stamp clubs, and adult clubs welcome children and often offer them free stamps. The clubs offer shows and exhibits and offer more swapping opportunities. Clubs often also have booklets where collectors offer stamps for sale, many of them inexpensive.

Where to get stamps? At first, just take them from the daily mail. It’s free, and it’s fun. You cut around the stamp with scissors and then soak the stamps in warm water in a sink or bathtub. Most of the stamps will detach from the envelopes; if not, then just cut closely around the stamp. Dry them on towels. If they start to curl, place another towel on top of them. For stamps on postal cards or postal stationary, just cut out the stamp. Advanced collectors often keep the whole card or envelope if they have interesting postmarks or pictures.

Stamps are usually collected in loose-leaf albums. Stamp stores and dealers sell printed albums, with pictures of the most common stamps where one would place the stamps. There are also albums with blank pages. I recommend the blank pages so that the child can create his or her own layout and organization. The child can also make his own album with punched sheets of paper and an album cover; use good quality, heavy, non-acid paper in that case.

The stamps are best attached to the pages with special stamp hinges which are sold in stamp stores and stationary stores. Do not glue them to the pages! There is only one rule in stamp collecting, and that is to avoid glue or sticky tape. This ruins the stamps, and prevents reorganization. The hinge is moistened with the tongue or a sponge, one end is attached to the stamp, and the other to the album. Let it dry before removing the hinge if the collector wishes to place the stamp in another area of the album. Once dry, the hinge is easily removed from the stamp or page without damage.

The collector can then ask friends and relatives to save stamps from their mail. Some businesses will save stamps for collectors, and when I was a child, I obtained a few stamps from trash containers in post offices. Why not? People were just throwing away perfectly good stamps.

One can also buy inexpensive packages of 1000 stamps or so from stamp stores, departments stores, or by mail from stamp dealers. Stamp newspapers such as Stamp Collector and Linn’s have ads with dealers. Besides local clubs, collectors also can join national organizations, the largest ones being the American Philatelic Society, PO Box 8000, State College, PA 16803, and the American Topical Association, PO Box 50820, Albuquerque, NM 87181. These societies have programs for children, including the opportunity to have foreign pen pals.

The two main ways of organizing collections are by country and by topic. In collecting by topic, the country is ignored and all stamps of a certain topic such as animals or art or space are placed on a page. As the collection grows, the topics can be separated into subtopics. Country collecting is usually done chronologically by date of issue, or also by type of stamp such as airmail. Stamp catalogues can help by providing the issue date as well as telling the price and some information about the stamps. The two main catalogues are Scott’s and Minkus.

Stamp collecting can also be an enjoyable hobby for adults, including retired folk. For young children, stamp collecting is not just sociable and fun, but can be an intellectual alternative to cacophonous video games. Done in a lighthearted way, stamps can be a catalyst to teaching a child a global perspective and topics such as wildlife conservation, history, government, and economics.

The pages of the album can represent land. The stamps can be like people located in the land. Some pages will be empty, some pages will have a few stamps, and other pages will fill up. As a page fills up, space becomes ever more scarce and has a premium. New stamps then have to settle elsewhere. Maybe the most valuable stamps can stay in the better pages, while the cheap stamps have to move to less desirable sites. The pages might stir up images of nations and animal kingdoms or stamp wars. Stamps can srike up the imagination and create a whole mental universe. Stamps can be deep and creative, a welcome alternative to the flashy thrills of some modern entertainment.

What do you know about philately? Ever been a stamp collector? Tell The Progress Report!Copyright 1998 by Fred E. Foldvary. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, which includes but is not limited to facsimile transmission, photocopying, recording, rekeying, or using any information storage or retrieveal system, without giving full credit to Fred Foldvary and The Progress Report.

We are Hanno Beck, Lindy Davies, Fred Foldvary, Mike O'Mara, Jeff Smith, and assorted volunteers, all dedicated to bringing you the news and views that make a difference in our species struggle to win justice, prosperity, and eco-librium.

Stamp collecting has changed since I was a kid. Id like to get my 8 year old granddaughter started collecting but would like to know the best place to get a big bag of world wide stamps..maybe a 1,000. What should they cost? Thanks!

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

more transformation than reform; it’s a step ahead. Harvard economics students this year did petition to change the curriculum, in the wake of the English who caught the dissension from across The Channel. French reformers, who fault conventional economics for conjuring mathematical models of little empirical relevance and being closed to critical and reflective thought, reject this “autism” – or detachment from reality – and dub their offering “post-autistic economics”. Not a bad name, but again, academics define themselves by what they’re not, not by what they are, unlike geonomists. We track rent – the money we spend on the nature we use – and watch it pull all the other economic indicators in its wake. We see economies as part and parcel of the ecosystem, similarly following natural patterns and able to self-regulate more so than allowed, once we quit distorting prices. To align people and planet, we’d replace taxes and subsidies with recovering and sharing rents.

a new policy from a new perspective. Once your worldview shifts — so that vacant city lots are no longer invisible — then epiphany. “Of course! Why didn’t I see it before?” Once you do see the emptiness and what damage it does, how can you ever go back to the old paradigm?

an answer to a rarely asked question. If price is a reward for production, why do we pay for land, never produced by any of us? What is land price a reward for? Good behavior? How much money do we spend on the nature we use? Who gets it? What do they do with it? (If you answer all these correctly, you’re not a genius but a geoist.) The worth of Earth is enough that were we to collect and share it, we could abolish taxes on the goods we do produce. For example, San Francisco’s Redefining Progress has calculated that Cali-fornia could abolish all state and local taxes were it to collect the values of resources and of using na-ture as a dump. By exorcising the profit motive from depletion and pollution, rent collection could replace bossy regulation. Economies could self-regulate, as the rest of the eco-system does. See how big problems yield to big answers when we ask the right questions?

the study of the money we spend on the nature we use. When we pay that money to private owners, we reward both speculation and over-extraction. Robert Kiyosaki’s bestseller, Rich Dad’s Prophecy, says, “One of the reasons McDonald’s is such a rich company is not because it sells a lot of burgers but because it owns the land at some of the best intersections in the world. The main reason Kim and I invest in such properties is to own the land at the corner of the intersection. (p 200) My real estate advisor states that the rich either made their money in real estate or hold their money in real estate.” (p 141, via Greg Young) When government recovers the rents for natural advantages for everyone, it can save citizens millions. Ben Sevack, Montreal steel manufacturer, tells us (August 12) that Alberta, by leasing oil & gas fields, recovers enough revenue to be the only province in Canada to get by without a sales tax and to levy a flat provincial income tax. While running for re-election, provincial Premier Ralph Klein proposes to abolish their income tax and promises to eliminate medical insurance premiums and use resource revenue to pay for all medical expense for seniors. After all this planned tax-cutting and greater expense, they still expect a large budget surplus. Even places without oil and gas have high site values in their downtowns, and high values in their utility franchises. Recover the values of locations and privileges, displace the harmful taxes on sales, salaries, and structures, then use the revenue to fund basic government and pay residents a dividend, and you have geonomics in action.

a manual. The world did not come without a way for people to prosper, and the planet to heal and stay well; that way is geonomics. Economies are part of the ecosystem. Both generate surpluses and follow self-regulating feedback loops. A cycle like the Law of Supply and Demand is one of the economy’s on/off loops. Our spending for land and resources – things that nobody made and everybody needs – constitutes our society’s surplus. Those profits without production (remember, nobody produced Earth) can become our commonwealth. To share it, we could pay land dues in to the public treasury (wouldn’t oil companies love that?) and get rent dividends back, a la Alaska’s oil dividend. Doing so let’s us axe taxes and jettison subsidies. Taxes and subsidies distort price (the DNA of exchange), violate quid pro quo by benefiting the well-connected more than anyone else, reinforce hierarchy of state over citizen, and are costly to administer (you don’t really need so much bureaucracy, do you?). Conversely, land dues motivate people to not waste sites, resources, and the ecosystem while rent dividends motivate people to not waste themselves. Receiving this income supplement – a Citizens Dividend – people can invest in their favorite technology or outgrow being “economan” and shrink their overbearing workweek in order to enjoy more time with family, friends, community, and nature. Then in all that free time, maybe we could figure out just what we are here for.

a POV that Spain’s president might try. A few blocks from my room in Madrid at a book fair to promote literacy, Sr Zapatero, while giving autographs and high fives to kids, said books are very expensive and he’d see about getting the value added tax on them cut down to zero. (El Pais, June 4; see, politicians can grasp geo-logic.) But why do we raise the cost of any useful product? Why not tax useless products? Even more basic: is being better than a costly tax good enough? Our favorite replacement for any tax is no tax: instead, run government like a business and charge full market value for the permits it issues, such as everything from corporate charters to emission allowances to resource leases. These pieces of paper are immensely valuable, yet now our steward, the state, gives them away for nearly free, absolutely free in some cases. Government is sitting on its own assets and needs merely to cash in by doing what any rational entity in the economy does – negotiate the best deal. Then with this profit, rather than fund more waste, pay the stakeholders, we citizenry, a dividend. Thereby geonomics gets rid of two huge problems. It replaces taxes with full-value fees and replaces subsidies for special interests with a Citizens Dividend for people in general. Neither left nor right, this reform is what both nature lovers and liberty lovers need to promote, right now.

of interest to Dave Lakhani, President Bold Approach (Mar 8) and Matt Ozga (Jan 29): “I write for the Washington Square News, the student run newspaper out of New York University. Geonomics seems like it has great significance, especially in this area. When was geonomics developed, and by whom?”
About 1982 I began. Two years later, Chilean Dr Manfred Max-Neef offered the term geonomics for Earth-friendly economics. In the mid-80s, a millionaire founded a Geonomics Institute on Middlebury College campus in Vermont re global trade. In the 1990s, CNBC cablecast a show, Geonomics, on world trade as it benefits world traders. My version of geonomics draws heavily from the American Henry George who wrote Progress & Poverty (1879) and won the mayoralty of New York but was denied his victory by Tammany Hall (1886). He in turn got lots from Brits David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and the French physiocrats of the 1700s. My version differs by focusing not on taxation but on the flow of rents for sites, resources, sinks, and government-granted privileges. Forgoing these trillions, we instead tax and subsidize, making waste cheap and sustainability expensive. To quit distorting price, replace taxes with “land dues” and replace subsidies with a Citizens Dividend.
Matt: “This idea of sharing rents sounds, if not explicitly socialist, at least at odds with some capitalist values (only the strong survive & prosper, etc). Is it fair to say that geonomics has some basis in socialist theory?”
A closer descriptor would be Christian. Beyond ethics into praxis, Alaska shares oil rent with residents, and they’re more libertarian than socialist. While individuals provide labor and capital, no one provides land while society generates its value. Rent is not private property but public property. Sharing Rent is predistribution, sharing it before an elite or state has a chance to get and misspend it, like a public REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) paying dividends to its stakeholders – a perfectly capitalist model. What we should leave untaxed are our sales, salaries, and structures, things we do produce.

a neologism for sharing “rent” or “social surplus” – the money we spend on the nature we use. When we buy land, such as the land beneath a home, we typically pay the wrong person – the homeowner. Instead, since land cost us nothing to make and is the common heri-tage of us all, rather than pay the owner, we should pay ourselves, our neighbors, our community. That is, we should all pay land dues to the public treasury, then our government would pay us land dividends from this collected revenue. It’s similar to the Alaska oil dividend, almost $2,000 last year. Indeed, the annual rental value of land, oil, all other natural resources, including the broadcast spectrum and other government-granted permits such as corporate charters, totals several trillion dollars each year. It’s so much that some could be spent on basic social services, the rest parceled out as a divi-dend, as Tom Paine suggested, and taxes (except any on natural rents) could be abolished, as Thomas Jeffer-son suggested. Were we sharing Earth by sharing her worth, territorial disputes would be fewer, less intense, and more resolvable.

a study of a phenomenon David Ricardo noted going on two centuries ago. When wine grapes rise to $10,000 a ton from the very best land (last year, cabernet sauvignon commanded an average of $4,021 a ton in the Napa Valley), then vineyard prices soar from $18,000 an acre in the 1980′s to $100,000 an acre five years ago and now for a top pedigree up to $300,000 an acre (The New York Times, April 9, via Wyn Achenbaum). Pricey land does not make wine pricey; spendy wine makes land spendy. While vintners make their wine tasty, nature and society in general – not any lone owner – make land desireable. Steve Kerch of CBS’s MarketWatch (April 5) notes that much of what a home sells for on the open market is a reflection of intangible factors such as what school district the house sits in. The price the builder has to pay for the land also tends to be driven by the same intangibles. Because the value of land comes from society, and because one’s use excludes the rest of society, each user owes all others compensation, and is owed compensation by everyone else. Sharing land’s value, instead of taxing one’s efforts, is the policy of geonomics.

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

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Thoughts for the Day

I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

Charles de Gaulle

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.

Christopher Reeve

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.

Norman Cousins

Good questions outrank easy answers.

Paul Samuelson

The Democratic and Republican parties, two apparently distinct political entities feeding at the same corporate trough.

Ralph Nader

To prevent government from becoming corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people and as directly within their control as may be.

Henry George

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

George Bernard Shaw

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

Mark Twain

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Albert Einstein

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.